


Rhyming History

by Ladybug_21



Category: London Spy, The Hour (TV)
Genre: Gen, Gratuitous Ben Whishaw Appreciation
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-08-18
Updated: 2020-08-18
Packaged: 2021-03-05 19:40:45
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,200
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/25760746
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Ladybug_21/pseuds/Ladybug_21
Summary: While attempting to tell the world the truth about Alex, Danny receives some advice from an enigmatic and strangely familiar figure. (Spoilers forLondon Spyand for Season 1 ofThe Hour.)
Relationships: Danny Holt/Alex Turner
Comments: 4
Kudos: 4





	Rhyming History

**Author's Note:**

> Having binged _London Spy_ a few weeks ago, and having finished _The Hour_ as of last night, I definitely came away from the first season of the latter being like, _Wait a minute, didn't I *just* watch Ben Whishaw play almost this exact same character but modern?!_ Granted, Danny Holt is 1000% sweeter than Freddie Lyon, whose adorable grumpy face has zero chill whatsoever, but the point remains. I own no rights to either franchise.

Danny never checked the mail that arrived at Scottie's house. None of it would be for him, anyway; all of the people who cared about him knew to come knock on the door, if they wanted to talk. But he still skimmed the newspaper every morning, waiting to see if something, somehow, had gotten through to the press. The boxes of blank pages still sat in Scottie's garage, quietly sinister reminders that they knew what he was up to. Still, Danny held out hope that one day, the truth about Alex's death would be known. A desperate, futile hope, of course, but Danny nevertheless dug in his fingernails and clung furiously to its surface even as it attempted to wriggle away.

Occasionally, Danny doodled in the Sunday crossword, the same mindless, inexact repetitions from his fateful train ride out to meet 'Mr and Mrs Turner'. ALISTAIR, ALEX, ALEX, ALEX, ALISTAIR. It occurred to Danny one day that a psychoanalyst would probably have an encyclopaedia's worth of comments to make about this idle habit; and then it occurred to him that his crosswords were probably the least of his worries if a psychoanalyst picked Danny's obsessions apart; and this made him laugh uncontrollably for several minutes, until he suddenly started sobbing and curled up in Scottie's bed feeling miserable and utterly helpless. He closed his eyes and gave himself permission to fall into an uneasy sleep, rather than staying up late, pacing around the living room, mulling over fantastical plans with his mind whirring too fast to sustain any one thought. _Tomorrow_ , Danny thought, exhausted. _Heaven willing—or, more likely, MI6 willing—_ _I'll still have tomorrow._

Danny awoke just before dawn, padded downstairs, and brewed himself a weak cup of tea with the teabag that he had used the night prior. Still alive, for one more day. The birds chirrupped intermittently in the trees outside as the sky slowly brightened. Danny rubbed his eyes. Early mornings like this suited his mood best, these odd, liminal moments between night and day, confusion and clarity. Everything at this hour was a soft, dreamlike grey, and Danny, in his soft knit shirts, surveyed the terrain with fatigued eyes and felt himself slip momentarily into a state of glorious invisibility.

A thud on the doorstep announced the arrival of the morning paper. Danny watched the hands on the clock on the wall tick by three whole minutes before he rose and retrieved the paper. He rifled through it, scanning the headlines between sips of tea driven more by nervous habit than by thirst. Nothing, nothing, nothing. His hand unconsciously picked up a pen and twirled it between his fingers, already anticipating wasting half an hour scribbling in the squares of the crossword. But when Danny's eyes fell on the puzzle, his brow furrowed.

Someone had tampered with his paper. The crossword had been annotated, certain squares circled, the numbers of hints underlined. Danny tapped the pen against the edge of the table, a percussive beat accompanying his thoughts for a few seconds. Then he leaned forward on his elbows, staring intently at the grid.

As Scottie had once noticed, Danny's ambition and conviction were grossly mismatched. Danny was the type of person who left projects half-finished, books half-read, without a jot of remorse or guilt for the incompletion, if and when he remembered at all. Alex had been the opposite, of course—not that Danny had ever known him to start puzzles or read for pleasure, but the Alex he had known felt a strong duty to complete anything that he had started. In the comfortable manner of two people sharing the better part of their lives, he had even begun to quietly finish the things that Danny started and abandoned, ironing the sleeves of shirts that Danny had left only half-pressed on the board, returning the vodka and shot glasses to the kitchen when Danny had left them in his room for too long, accommodating Danny's non-committal nature towards much of his life by tucking his organised nature around the edges of Danny's warm untidiness.

Danny had never finished a crossword in his life. But now, remembering how Alex had always _(always)_ finished the ones that Danny started, he forced himself to finish exactly one crossword for Alex.

Finally, several days later, Danny finally sat back, double-checked one word on the computer (accuracy was more important here than any sense of propriety), and admired his handiwork, redone and illegible and surrounded by daydreaming doodles as it was. Then he wrote out all of the letters that appeared in circles and hint numbers that had been underlined, and he stared at them until finally—after several more days of examining and then letting sit and then re-examining—the letters shuffled themselves into a word, which the computer informed him was a street located in Islington, and the underlined numbers only could be arranged into one possible house number on the street.

It took Danny another two days to muster the energy to make his way to Islington, but he managed. Even sitting on the Underground, surrounded by strangers who couldn't seem to give less of a damn about who Danny was, he felt himself come back to life just a little more. Calcifying in Scottie's house, a sitting duck for MI6 to target at will, clearly wasn't good for his emotional well-being. He switched trains several times, ducking out of the doors just before they closed so that anyone following would have no time to follow, always going back up aboveground between getting back on the train, so that the Tube CCTV wouldn't simply capture him waiting for the next train. By the time he reached the address from the crossword, adrenaline was coursing through his veins and a slight drizzle made the air around him thick with a dampness that Danny truly couldn't wait to escape.

He rapped sharply on the door and stood there, waiting, for at least two minutes. He finally decided that the residents must be out, but as he was turning to leave, the door creaked slowly open behind him.

"Knew you'd come," said an oddly familiar voice, hoarse and cracked with age. "Best step in, out of the damp."

Danny nodded at the old man who had answered his knock and followed him inside, shutting the door behind him. The inside of the house was dark and untidy, but when Danny entered the living room, he could see that the furnishings had once been tasteful, if old and worn now.

"Please, sit," said the old man, hobbling unsteadily over to the windows. Leaning heavily on his cane, he pulled the sheer curtains down over the panes with a trembling hand, the light from the grey sky suddenly replaced by something even softer. "I'd offer you something to eat or drink, but I'm afraid I don't have anything in the cupboards."

"That's all right," Danny said politely, ignoring the rumble in his stomach (he had forgotten to eat breakfast before setting off for Islington).

The old man made his way to the armchair across from the one in which Danny had seated himself, and he slowly lowered himself down with a sigh, the springs of the chair groaning under his weight. Folding his hands over the top of his cane, he stared intently at Danny, and Danny stared intently back.

The man looked as if he were in his mid-eighties, a formerly delicate jaw squared out by aging skin, trembling hands and arms dappled with liver spots up to the cuffs of his knit cardigan. He still had a shock of white hair that sprang defiantly from his scalp. Behind thick spectacles, his eyes were a narrowed, piercing blue; they surveyed Danny with a shrewd, arrogant intelligence that reminded Danny uncomfortably of Frances Turner.

"So," said the old man finally. "You're Danny Holt."

"How did you know I'd come?" Danny asked.

"I have a knack for anticipating these things," shrugged the old man. "Served me well in my career, knowing when people would show or not. It's a matter of anticipating what a person has to gain, or what a person has to lose, if they don't. And sometimes, it's simply a matter of knowing well enough who a person is, and what they'll do."

The old man picked up a packet of cigarettes from the side table and attempted to light one with trembling fingers. Danny eventually reached out a hand and held the lighter steady while the old man lit up.

"In your case," the man continued, "I'd say it's a bit of both. I know what you have to gain and what you have to lose, and that means that I know well enough who you are."

"And why's that?" Danny was suddenly glad that he'd had an evening's worth of Frances Turner's equally cryptic guessing games by now; otherwise, he wouldn't have known how to deal with this enigmatic man at all.

The old man sighed a long, rattling sigh, fidgeting with the handle of his cane. Danny got the impression that, were it not for his bad leg, the old man would be prowling about the room, his body keeping pace with the bursts of energy emitted by his brain.

"Because I was once in a situation curiously similar to yours," he said finally. "You know what they say, about how history doesn't repeat, but it rhymes? The expression is sometimes attributed to Mark Twain, although no one's ever confirmed that, so I prefer to credit that great, faceless coiner of witticisms, Anonymous."

"What do you mean, you were once in a situation like mine?" Danny interrupted.

"Hmm." The old man eyed him critically. "Well, see, the contours are similar. The outlines, if you will, although the hues with which those outlines have been coloured in are quite different. My story is that of an ambitious and penniless young man, madly in love with someone far beyond his rank and constantly trying to prove his worth through wit and adoration. Living a fairly typical existence—well, 'typical' perhaps isn't the right word, our careers are one point at which our outlines suddenly are splashed in dramatically different palettes. But suffice to say that life was going as it should have been; and then, one evening, the young man in my story went to visit a beautiful young woman who had been a close childhood friend, who wanted desperately to tell him her secrets. Only when he arrived to speak with her, she was gasping her last breath."

The old man takes a long drag on his cigarette.

"They tried to make it look like suicide," he said, the casual tone of his voice undercut by the cold fury in his eyes. "The forensics didn't match up. She died too quickly, her vertebrae were snapped in the wrong places for a fall from a height that small. But no one would listen to the young man when he insisted that there had been foul play. Some patted him sympathetically on the shoulder and advised him to move on from a terrible tragedy like that. Some, more puzzlingly, ordered him to stop following the story. But what the man found most interesting were those who begged him to focus his attention elsewhere. It was impossible not to notice the fear in the eyes of those people. It only made him want to fall further down the rabbit hole."

"And you did," Danny surmised after a moment.

"Yes," sighed the old man in a billow of indigo smoke.

"And did it help?" Danny asked.

The old man didn't respond immediately. Watching the cigarette smoke drift slowly upwards, with the rain pattering on the window and the sheer curtains diffusing the cold light, Danny had the sudden, strange sensation of being underwater. Perhaps they all were slowly drowning, doomed to suffocate in the orderly deceits of the society that surrounded them.

"Back then, I was obsessed with discovering the truth," said the old man quietly. "If my wife were still alive, no doubt she would say that nothing has changed to this day. But the truth, as you're unquestionably aware, comes with a price. Always. It's nearly cost me my life, more than once. And it's hurt me in other ways, to discover the truth. The beautiful young woman, it turned out, was being groomed as a Soviet informant. After I'd spent months of searching and questioning—coming home to find the flat turned over, making myself a rather unwelcome guest at her family's estate, even being outright scolded by her mother—that was the hard reality that I had to face. I still can't forgive MI6 for breaking her neck, and for trying to break mine, and I never will. But it made me understand why it had been done."

"But, even then, you don't regret it, following things to the bitter end."

"No." A smile flickered across the old man's face, one that Danny could only describe as somewhat smug. "No, I don't. Call me a manipulative bastard, if you will, but once I finally convinced her parents to tell me what had happened to her, I leveraged her father's grief to expose the government at an even higher level of deceit. At that point, it wasn't about exposing the details of her death, and making it known that her supposed suicide was a lie; she was dead, and the truth about her death wasn't going to bring her back. But we struck the government a heavy blow, on live national television. The footage might even be out there somewhere on the internet, I know Bel saved a copy of the reel, at any rate. And I think that taking our small revenge, in that manner, was the closure that both her father and I needed."

The old man leaned forward, his eyes blazing.

"The truth always matters," he said fiercely. "But know what battles to fight. That was something that I had to learn. I chose my battles wisely. As I mentioned, I nearly didn't survive one or two. But I always won. Now, look. I can tell that you want the world to know who your partner was, and that he wasn't what the press made him out to be. The second I opened my paper and glanced at your interview, I could sense that that was what you wanted—even if the press had its own agenda, I know by now how to follow the actual story behind the spin. But it's not going to bring him back, telling the world how good he was."

"But that's all I _can_ do," Danny interrupted. "All the rest of what I've found, the government secrets and such, that's nothing to do with me. I'm not _qualified_ to speak about any of that. All I can say is that I loved him, and they killed him. No one will believe anything that I say, beyond that."

"Then you need allies whose credibility will withstand that scrutiny," said the old man calmly. "People whose reputations haven't been as thoroughly dismantled as yours has been. You have to aim higher than you have, dig even deeper, if you want to hurt them just as much as they've hurt you. You already _have_ bits and pieces of evidence, so, as my former boss would put it, go find more and pull together a story that's so well-supported that no one can ignore it. The government secrets aren't the reason that you want the world to know about your partner's death, but using them is the only way you're going to cut deep enough to get your revenge."

Danny nodded, tentatively at first, then more resolutely, acutely aware of the encoded drive hanging around his neck.

"Why are you helping me?" he asked finally. "You know exactly how much danger you could be in, offering me advice. They've already killed one of my friends, and you could be next."

"Because I am old," smiled the old man, apparently completely unconcerned about the implicit target now plastered on his back. "You might say that I've become almost as jaded and world-weary as some of the magnificent former war correspondents I've known; the prospect of death doesn't trouble me nearly so much as the fear of boredom. Also because I have nothing to offer of any substance. The best I can do is to fan the flames of revolution, but alas, I have no wood to feed the fire. They're not going to kick up too much of a fuss over just that. Besides, I like watching the powers that be squirm, when they begin using lies and murder to destroy democracy. _Look on my Works, ye Mighty, and despair! / Nothing beside remains._ Perhaps I've never been able to word it as eloquently as Shelley, but still. It's good for them, you know, to be reminded that they, too, will one day fall."

From anyone else, the stream-of-consciousness nature of his speech might have come across as the stirrings of dementia, but a string of pure lucidity arced between the phrases. Seeing how piercingly the old man gazed at him, Danny was reasonably sure that this was how his curious adviser had spoken his entire life. The old man pushed himself to his feet and steadied himself with one hand on the back of his armchair. He held out his other hand to Danny.

"As I mentioned, I can't help you collect any evidence, as I'm afraid all of my sources ran dry decades ago," he said. "But please do knock anytime you need a word of encouragement."

"Thank you," said Danny, shaking the old man's hand. "Erm, I don't think I caught your name, by the way?"

"My name." The old man smiled. "Would you prefer the truth, or a pseudonym?"

"How about you don't tell me whether it's the truth or not?" Danny suggested. "That way, I'll be able to say that I'm truly not sure who you are, if anyone asks."

"Very clever," said the old man. "Well, then. The name's Brightstone. James Brightstone."

"Mr Brightstone." Danny nodded. "Thank you again."

"Good luck, Mr Holt," said the old man, following Danny slowly down the hall to the door. "I'll be keeping an eye out, hoping to see you do the impossible. Because, keep in mind, impossible is just what hasn't been done. It's not impossible when it's possible. And, in this case, it is indeed possible, and the hour that you break this story will be the hour that I can't miss."

Danny was still bewildered by the enigmatic Probably Not Actually Mr Brightstone, but he liked the old man. There was something comforting about the calm, slightly mad confidence with which he spoke, as if he had already lived out Danny's past and future and could offer reassurance that righteousness would prevail. The drizzle had abated a bit, at any rate, so Danny nodded a farewell and stepped out the front door. He heard the latch click shut behind him as he pulled his hood up over his head and once more disappeared into the grey streets of London.


End file.
